Subaru car prepped for record river cleanup organizers

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that we had exceeded last year's number by 50. Well, as of today we've doubled last year's total (300 cleanup organizers!). And it continues to grow, which is very cool.

On top of it, looks like we'll have four 2008 Subarus (possibly before they even hit the showroom floor) to drive around various parts of the country promoting National River Cleanup Week.

What does this have to do with our website? I'm hoping with the four cars we can create live blogging events that includes photos, video, and/or podcasts chronicling the June 2 - 10 cleanup events. I'm thinking lots of video, possibly even daily video logs from out in the field, but we need a vlogger. Think Amanda Congdon or ZeFrank is available?

Google map for river cleanup registration working well

We have about 6-weeks left until the National River Cleanup Week registration deadline arrives and we've already exceeded last year's number of organizers by 50 - very cool! We've had a couple of hiccups early on with the Google-map-in-reverse strategy, but it seems to be working just fine now - I think it was (usually is) an issue with our language, not clear enough.

We've come a long way since our launch in December with 5 registrations. It's been fun as the department has been taking bets on how many cleanups will be organized (yes, I've been the skeptical one with the low number); makes it interesting when the Google map is populated in real-time. As of today, we have 219 registrations. Check it out.

Day 1: five cleanups registered

We've completed day 1 and we have five cleanups that have been registered. We had one hiccup right from the start, but puffinworks was on top of it and so far, it seems pretty straight forward for folks. Haven't heard from anyone, so we'll take the 'no news is good news' approach.

We have though just sent our monthly newsletter out with NRCW as the feature story, so I'd expect a lot of visits today and hopefully more registered cleanups.

NRCW.org Vizu poll

Quick poll to follow up with the release of NationalRiverCleanup.org

Is the National River Cleanup Week registration process:

Easy to follow and a little different Excellent, love the 'Google in Reverse' registration process Okay, I guess, but it was a little time consuming to register for a cleanup Very confusing and took a great deal of my concentration to register for a cleanup

Make Free Online Polls

National River Cleanup Week is live!

Take a peak, we're up and running with a soft launch...until tomorrow when we send out to our media lists. We'll follow on Thursday with a mention in our email newsletter, The Current. Then the following week, a greater placement on our homepage.

Take a spin and leave a few thoughts, words of wisdom, or ideas for improvement - NationalRiverCleanup.org.

Though we're live, this is just the beginning. Hopefully, we've prepared ourselves well enough to weather the fiercest user-confrontation storm, i.e registration process.

I'm anxious to see what experience folks have and fortunately we are tracking the movement with Google Analytics - that will help.

Old web page hosted on America Outdoors website (still there as I'm working on a redirect).

New National River Cleanup Week website with a flash introduction.

National River Cleanup Week launches Wednesday

So we hope.

The plan right now is to make one last round of non-text related edits and then tomorrow (cross your fingers) go through the text. Fortunately, there aren't many words, but we need to go through it pretty thoroughly.

On Wednesday, we’ll turn it loose with a press release before we send it out to with our monthly newsletter audience on Thursday. After that, I’m sure we’ll go through another round of edits from opening it up to a larger audience and then, hopefully, one last nip and tuck and be done with it….until next week.

The registration process is really the heart and sole of the site, so we’ll have to see how users respond to the process with their specific registration. I'm concerned whether or not users will be comfortable with the idea of zooming in on a specific location for their cleanup. Though cool and different, it does require a little work and patience.

New, new river trash photo selected

The right photo makes all of the difference and I think we found it. Disregard the previous post and implication that we settled on an image, because we found an even better photo for the National River Cleanup Week's flash introduction.

What makes this photo pretty cool is that there is an actual connection to our efforts; it was taken in 2005 during a cleanup by a volunteer (and/or supporter, employee, etc) of Friends of Coyote Creek. In fact, there are a lot of photos on Flickr pertaining to specific river cleanups (bodes well for us!).

I especially liked Tom's description of the photo:

An amazing assortment of junk collects in these rafts, swimming pool hoses, soccer balls, water jugs, juice boxes, beer bottles, soda cans, spent condoms, and anything and everything styrofoam.

...During the winter, trees fall into the creek and obstruct the flow. At the same time all of the litter along the streets is washed into the storm sewers and into the creek. The result is the trash rafts.

Fortunately, there are groups like the Friends of Coyote Creek who organize creek clean-ups and do creek maintenance to remove the obstructions to flow.

And fortunately there are folks like Tom who are active with their local groups. Thanks Tom as these words sum up the need for a LARGE outpouring of volunteer and organizer support in 2007. Stay tuned for NRCW website updates; it's getting to be crunch time.

River trash photo settled

The right photo to convey the right meaning is not always an easy thing to agree on. An understatement to say the least, but it’s an important process nonetheless.

It reminds me of choosing the right color of the paint for the bedroom, and though you might like a hint of yellow, your wife tells you that statistically couples are 75% more likely to quarrel in a yellow room. So yellow is out.

Statistics or not, the right paint as well as the right photo is key. For our national site, the top viewed page is our photo album, so images are very important.

We went back and forth with the leading trash image on the National River Cleanup website and I think we’re at a temporary resting place. Looks like we’re planning on keeping the original image [see above] but moving the photo up a bit so that the tires are a little more present, giving the feeling of trash instead polished rocks (i.e. Styrofoam).

This photo is from Flickr and is under a Creative Commons license with attribution, view it’s home.

Our homepage header gets trashed

I've run this by some key individuals within the organization and the consensus is that this photo is not trashy enough.

Sure, there are tires and styrofoam products in the image, but it’s not that obvious. So, keeping in mind with what I learned the other day, we need to find a photo that contains a stronger call to arms for our national river cleanup website.

Though the trash in our rivers is plentiful (unfortunately), the right sized photos are not.

A couple images that may work are below, but this may take a little time and we’re starting to push the comfort level for when we would like to launch this site…first week in December!




Any of the above photos stand out? The bottom two of are from ShutterStock.com and the first one is a random image from Flickr (which btw had pages of river trash - there's even a group called River Trash). For the Flickr photo, I've got an email out to the owner to ask for his permission - I think it's the best one, but size may be an issue.

Google in reverse allows us to move forward

We’ve gone around the horn with the National River Cleanup Week registration process trying to find the most effective one-two combination and I think we’re on to something…a Google map in reverse.

Our challenge has been potentially plotting multiple 2007 cleanups on one river and all within the same zip code too. It's not too accurate and we definitely didn’t want to ask for the cleanup longitude and latitude, so we were stuck with finding the easiest and most precise way to capture an exact data point (2007 river cleanups) for the map.

The draft to date contains a blank map of the US and once an organizer decides he/she is ready to register, they go to the map and zoom in to the exact location and register—very cool.

I zoomed in (photo above) to my home in DC, then moved north a bit, and found the section of Rock Creek in Rock Creek Park that I wanted to organize a cleanup around and clicked ‘Save’. My coordinates were saved and I was then routed to a registration page that asked for additional, but necessary information. After that I got an email to confirm my registration (crucial authorization step) and then it’s up to me to recruit my cleanup volunteers, if I haven't done that already.

This seems to work very well and I really like that this gives the traditionally boring online registration process a little excitement and interaction.

Cropping photos clean for the web

The flash introduction to our National River Cleanup Week website looks great, however several folks who took a fresh look at it thought it was hard to tell that the photo of river trash was actually river trash.

I’m a little too close to the project, so I’m sort of useless, but more than one person mentioned the tough to tell river trash header. And that's enough for me.

So, we’re looking for another image, but we need a clean crop—a term I recently learned—and to further clarify PuffinWorks.com, our web developer, wrote this:

Attached [above] is a photo you sent me earlier that measures 500 x 375 pixels. I've outlined in red a crop measuring 500 x 100 pixels.

A clean crop is one like this that hasn't been compressed or changed in any fashion, but is simply sliced out of an entire photo.

We couldn't take the entire photo and compress it into this 500 x 100 pixel space or it would look squashed; likewise, we couldn't take this crop and stretch it into the size we need for your header image that is 770 pixels wide.

Thus, we've got to have a photo at least 770 pixels wide in order to "clean crop" a slice 770 x 230 pixels.

So the hunt continues for a good, clean cropped photo of river trash.

Google’s Sandbox is not the place to play

I learned a pretty big lesson yesterday. For one of our redesigns in motions, I’ve included the live link to the pages for folks to review our work to date. I’ve just learned that this is poor form.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reaching out to various folks for their input and feedback. Well, with our work on the National River Cleanup Week taking shape, I wanted to share my efforts with our designer in Wyoming for his thoughts.

Over the last couple of years I’ve learned a great deal from PuffinWorks.com and have a lot of respect and admiration for the services they provide to progressive nonprofits.

PuffinWorks.com succeeds in providing nonprofits the technical expertise with a persistent 30,000' view. In my experience, either you’re a skilled developer or a keen strategist, rarely both.

Anyhow, when I shared my efforts to date with PuffinWorks.com, I learned of the potentially negative implications of making your test URL links live:

As soon as the Google bot indexes your blog, it will find the page links to NRCW and then attempt to index the pages. You don't want your NRCW pages indexed yet because they aren't complete--those may lead to broken links later if Google fails to remove them, which it frequently does, and thus you may end up in Google's sandbox--one of my clients just emerged after 18 months for a similar offense! Also, I will have to disconnect the form now; we don't want the public accessing this form because I haven't installed any security protections yet.

A fairly large bonehead move, so I removed any and all National River Cleanup links from the blog and from now on will only have screen shots. This blog is about sharing my experience and learning from others, but I don't want to bring down the house in the process.

Our first draft of 'the Google' map is live

We have a draft of the 2006 cleanup map. We're still addressing the issues noted earlier, but at least this gives us a great visual of previous cleanup efforts. Very cool.

Our primary audience is indeed the organizers, but we also want to attract prospective volunteers by having them search a cleanup in their state. This will be a second map and will allow prospective volunteers to find a cleanup going on near them as well as who to contact.

We just had a larger team meeting with fresh eyes and the feedback was great. The whole website redesign process is like peeling back an onion, corny but true. Basically, we're trying to peel back each layer, one at a time, careful to not jump ahead of ourselves.

I'm finding the trick is staying true to your layer, for example, addressing text while we're finalizing navigation is less than idea, but sometimes inevitable too. And, like many people, I find it hard to focus on one aspect when reviewing a new site, but this is important. I'm thinking I need to enter these conversations with more specific outcomes desired.

This means setting boundaries early on in regards to what we want to accomplish. Just an fyi to myself (can you do that?), but I've always found it hard to determine the best time during a redesign to solicit feedback. And I guess, as this blog hopefully attests to, earlier is probably better than later.

2nd draft: National River Cleanup Week

The second draft is complete. For this round, I sat down with our team leader and we went through the site, page by page. It’s not a big site, but took a little time to think about user scenarios.

Anyhow, we felt like the trash photo in the flash header was a little tough to tell that it was actually trash on a river. I've looked at it too many times now, does it look like trash to you?

It would be a little challenging to change it now unless we can find a “clean crop” photo (new language for me). Basically, not any photo will do, we need a photo that fits the header. Apparently compressing a photo to fit the 230px height doesn’t work. Dealing with photos is not one of my favorite web development activities.

We did away with the Contact tab in the top navigation and added it to the About Us tab. Other than that there were a couple of minor changes, nothing too big. The real crux here is the registration process: currently folks register and then once they confirm their username and password, return to the site and enter their cleanup details which will then be plugged on a Google map—cool.

However, there are challenges with that too since Google maps don’t necessarily work very well with a lot of data points. Apparently, Google is trying to fix it, but in the mean time we’ll have to use clusters. Stay tuned, hope to show you a draft of our Google map.

Website rough draft: National River Cleanup Week

NationalRiverCleanup.org is beggining to take shape. We have a first draft of the site and will look it over with folks on staff this week as we're still shooting for a December launch (though November would be ideal). Our designer is still working on the maps, but at least we can start reviewing the existing page content. This will be a work in progress.

Ahhh, automation

After going back and forth for a bit, we decided to automate the registration process for the National River Cleanup Week website. It doubled our costs, but will hopefully save valuable staff time in the end.

The basic process entails an online form that collects the data fields listed below. Before submitting the form, the registrant will enter several characters from a Captcha box which prevents automated form bots from submitting the form. Upon successful submission, an automated email message is sent to the registrant containing a username (email address) and password (which allows the registrant to log in to the website later and update their data, if necessary), along with a confirmation link. Clicking the automated link in the message completes the registration process by validating the registrant's email address.

This process won't avoid false registrations entirely, but it requires a valid email address since the registrant has to receive the confirmation message in order to finalize registration. It's the best method if we wish to automate the entire registration process, short of an administrator approving/disapproving each registration (which is still the safest method but requires oversight).

As an administrator, we will be able to:

• review the entire list at any time and edit or disable a registrant's data.
• search the list based on various data fields.
• export the data to a delimited file for use with other software.
• send an HTML email message to any or all registrants.

Attempting to keep our registration form lean, we’ve reduced the number of items from a pretty big list to the one below. This information will then be used to populate a Google map for volunteers to search and find a cleanup close to them. Pretty hot.

Contact Name
Contact Email
Organization
Address
City
State
Zip
Phone
Cleanup Date
Cleanup Time
Cleanup Location
Estimated Cleanup Distance (in miles)
Estimated number of volunteers
Estimated number of trash bags needed

It’s hard not to feel we’ve somehow packed our bags, but have left something behind. Honing in on this information now, early in the development, requires a good bit of vision for the site…and since it’s a new site, to a certain extent, hard to imagine we’ve thought of everything. We won’t be able to go back and make changes to the registration process without incurring significant costs.

Somehow I still feel like I left my wallet at home.

National River Cleanup Week (.org) underway

This is a start to a fairly new project. It's pretty ambitious, but exciting as it fits in pretty well with our existing work.

We’ve recently adopted the 15 year-old national river cleanup from America Outdoors, but with some challenges of course: how to convert an audience comfortable with direct mail to online registration. And for that matter, everything online.

The existing site, nationalrivercleanup.com, consists of pages within America Outdoors. We’re working with a one-man development team (who btw provides a great service to non-profits!) to redesign the navigation, architecture, and overall feel of the site. We've recently completed a draft of the navigation, which will set the course (and foundation) for the work to follow.